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Item Interactive Modeling of Mechanical Objects(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Ureta, Francisca Gil; Tymms, Chelsea; Zorin, Denis; Maks Ovsjanikov and Daniele PanozzoObjects with various types of mechanical joints are among the most commonly built. Joints implement a vocabulary of simple constrained motions (kinematic pairs) that can be used to build more complex behaviors. Defining physically correct joint geometry is crucial both for realistic appearance of models during motion, as these are typically the only parts of geometry that stay in contact, and for fabrication. Direct design of joint geometry often requires more effort than the design of the rest of the object geometry, as it requires design of components that stay in precise contact, are aligned with other parts, and allow the desired range of motion. We present an interactive system for creating physically realizable joints with user-controlled appearance. Our system minimizes or, in most cases, completely eliminates the need for the user to manipulate low-level geometry of joints. This is achieved by automatically inferring a small number of plausible combinations of joint dimensions, placement and orientation from part geometry, with the user making the final high-level selection based on object semantic. Through user studies, we demonstrate that functional results with a satisfying appearance can be obtained quickly by users with minimal modeling experience, offering a significant improvement in the time required for joint construction, compared to standard modeling approaches.Item Polycube Simplification for Coarse Layouts of Surfaces and Volumes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Cherchi, Gianmarco; Livesu, Marco; Scateni, Riccardo; Maks Ovsjanikov and Daniele PanozzoRepresenting digital objects with structured meshes that embed a coarse block decomposition is a relevant problem in applications like computer animation, physically-based simulation and Computer Aided Design (CAD). One of the key ingredients to produce coarse block structures is to achieve a good alignment between the mesh singularities (i.e., the corners of each block). In this paper we improve on the polycube-based meshing pipeline to produce both surface and volumetric coarse block-structured meshes of general shapes. To this aim we add a new step in the pipeline. Our goal is to optimize the positions of the polycube corners to produce as coarse as possible base complexes. We rely on re-mapping the positions of the corners on an integer grid and then using integer numerical programming to reach the optimal. To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt to solve the singularity misalignment problem directly in polycube space. Previous methods for polycube generation did not specifically address this issue. Our corner optimization strategy is efficient and requires a negligible extra running time for the meshing pipeline. In the paper we show that our optimized polycubes produce coarser block structured surface and volumetric meshes if compared with previous approaches. They also induce higher quality hexahedral meshes and are better suited for spline fitting because they reduce the number of splines necessary to cover the domain, thus improving both the efficiency and the overall level of smoothness throughout the volume.Item Directional Field Synthesis, Design, and Processing(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Vaxman, Amir; Campen, Marcel; Diamanti, Olga; Panozzo, Daniele; Bommes, David; Hildebrandt, Klaus; Ben-Chen, Mirela; Joaquim Madeira and Gustavo PatowDirection fields and vector fields play an increasingly important role in computer graphics and geometry processing. The synthesis of directional fields on surfaces, or other spatial domains, is a fundamental step in numerous applications, such as mesh generation, deformation, texture mapping, and many more. The wide range of applications resulted in definitions for many types of directional fields: from vector and tensor fields, over line and cross fields, to frame and vector-set fields. Depending on the application at hand, researchers have used various notions of objectives and constraints to synthesize such fields. These notions are defined in terms of fairness, feature alignment, symmetry, or field topology, to mention just a few. To facilitate these objectives, various representations, discretizations, and optimization strategies have been developed. These choices come with varying strengths and weaknesses. This report provides a systematic overview of directional field synthesis for graphics applications, the challenges it poses, and the methods developed in recent years to address these challenges.Item Rib-reinforced Shell Structure(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Li, Wei; Zheng, Anzong; You, Lihua; Yang, Xiaosong; Zhang, Jianjun; Liu, Ligang; Jernej Barbic and Wen-Chieh Lin and Olga Sorkine-HornungShell structures are extensively used in engineering due to their efficient load-carrying capacity relative to material volume. However, large-span shells require additional supporting structures to strengthen fragile regions. The problem of designing optimal stiffeners is therefore becoming a major challenge for shell applications. To address it, we propose a computational framework to design and optimize rib layout on arbitrary shell to improve the overall structural stiffness and mechanical performance. The essential of our method is to place ribs along the principal stress lines which reflect paths of material continuity and indicates trajectories of internal forces. Given a surface and user-specified external loads, we perform a Finite Element Analysis. Using the resulting principal stress field, we generate a quad-mesh whose edges align with this cross field. Then we extract an initial rib network from the quad-mesh. After simplifying rib network by removing ribs with little contribution, we perform a rib flow optimization which allows ribs to swing on surface to further adjust rib distribution. Finally, we optimize rib cross-section to maximally reduce material usage while achieving certain structural stiffness requirements. We demonstrate that our rib-reinforced shell structures achieve good static performances. And experimental results by 3D printed objects show the effectiveness of our method.Item Advection-Based Function Matching on Surfaces(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Azencot, Omri; Vantzos, Orestis; Ben-Chen, Mirela; Maks Ovsjanikov and Daniele PanozzoA tangent vector field on a surface is the generator of a smooth family of maps from the surface to itself, known as the flow. Given a scalar function on the surface, it can be transported, or advected, by composing it with a vector field's flow. Such transport is exhibited by many physical phenomena, e.g., in fluid dynamics. In this paper, we are interested in the inverse problem: given source and target functions, compute a vector field whose flow advects the source to the target. We propose a method for addressing this problem, by minimizing an energy given by the advection constraint together with a regularizing term for the vector field. Our approach is inspired by a similar method in computational anatomy, known as LDDMM, yet leverages the recent framework of functional vector fields for discretizing the advection and the flow as operators on scalar functions. The latter allows us to efficiently generalize LDDMM to curved surfaces, without explicitly computing the flow lines of the vector field we are optimizing for. We show two approaches for the solution: using linear advection with multiple vector fields, and using non-linear advection with a single vector field. We additionally derive an approximated gradient of the corresponding energy, which is based on a novel vector field transport operator. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our machinery to intrinsic symmetry analysis, function interpolation and map improvement.Item Spatial Matching of Animated Meshes(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Seo, Hyewon; Cordier, Frederic; Eitan Grinspun and Bernd Bickel and Yoshinori DobashiThis paper presents a new technique which makes use of deformation and motion properties between animated meshes for finding their spatial correspondences. Given a pair of animated meshes exhibiting a semantically similar motion, we compute a sparse set of feature points on each mesh and compute spatial correspondences among them so that points with similar motion behavior are put in correspondence. At the core of our technique is our new, dynamic feature descriptor named AnimHOG, which encodes local deformation characteristics. AnimHOG is ob-tained by computing the gradient of a scalar field inside the spatiotemporal neighborhood of a point of interest, where the scalar values are obtained from the deformation characteristic associated with each vertex and at each frame. The final matching has been formulated as a discreet optimization problem that finds the matching of each feature point on the source mesh so that the descriptor similarity between the corresponding feature pairs as well as compatibility and consistency as measured across the pairs of correspondences are maximized. Consequently, reliable correspondences can be found even among the meshes of very different shape, as long as their motions are similar. We demonstrate the performance of our technique by showing the good quality of matching results we obtained on a number of animated mesh pairs.Item An Edit Distance for Reeb Graphs(The Eurographics Association, 2016) Bauer, Ulrich; Fabio, Barbara Di; Landi, Claudia; A. Ferreira and A. Giachetti and D. GiorgiWe consider the problem of assessing the similarity of 3D shapes using Reeb graphs from the standpoint of robustness under perturbations. For this purpose, 3D objects are viewed as spaces endowed with real-valued functions, while the similarity between the resulting Reeb graphs is addressed through a graph edit distance. The cases of smooth functions on manifolds and piecewise linear functions on polyhedra stand out as the most interesting ones. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a general edit distance suitable for comparing Reeb graphs in these settings. This edit distance promises to be useful for applications in 3D object retrieval because of its stability properties in the presence of noise.Item A Macroblock Optimization for Grid-based Nonlinear Elasticity(The Eurographics Association, 2016) Mitchell, Nathan; Doescher, Michael; Sifakis, Eftychios; Ladislav Kavan and Chris WojtanWe introduce a new numerical approach for the solution of grid-based discretizations of nonlinear elastic models. Our method targets the linearized system of equations within each iteration of the Newton method, and combines elements of a direct factorization scheme with an iterative Conjugate Gradient method. The goal of our hybrid scheme is to inherit as many of the advantages of its constituent approaches, while curtailing several of their respective drawbacks. In particular, our algorithm converges in far fewer iterations than Conjugate Gradients, especially for systems with less-than-ideal conditioning. On the other hand, our approach largely avoids the storage footprint and memory-bound nature of direct methods, such as sparse Cholesky factorization, while offering very direct opportunities for both SIMD and thread-based parallelism. Conceptually, our method aggregates a rectangular neighborhood of grid cells (typically a 16x8x8 subgrid) into a composite element that we refer to as a ''macroblock''. Similar to conventional tetrahedral or hexahedral elements, macroblocks receive nodal inputs (e.g., displacements) and compute nodal outputs (e.g., forces). However, this input/output interface now only includes nodes on the boundary of the 16x8x8 macroblock; interior nodes are always solved exactly, by means of a direct, highly optimized solver. Models built from macroblocks are solved using Conjugate Gradients, which is accelerated due to the reduced number of degrees of freedom and improved robustness against poor conditioning thanks to the direct solver within each macroblock. We explain how we attain these benefits with just a small increase of the per-iteration cost over the simplest traditional solvers.Item Weathering of Urban Scenes: Challenges and Possible Solutions(The Eurographics Association, 2016) Muñoz-Pandiella, I.; Bosch, C.; Mérillou, N.; Pueyo, X.; Mérillou, S; Patow, G.; Reinhard Klein and Holly RushmeierIn this paper, we propose to discuss on one of the main challenges in realistic rendering of urban scenes: changes in appearance over time within a urban context. After studying the previous work on weathering techniques, we have found that there is a lack of estimation for some important environmental parameters (such as sun radiation) that have a wrong impact on weathering phenomena simulation and, thus, on the appearance of virtual objects. We also think that such a problem needs to be addressed on large urban models. Here, we discuss some possible solutions we have studied in our research. These solutions are focused on screen-space techniques, in order to efficiently compute those factors and use them to interactively generate weathering effects.Item Building Construction Sets by Tiling Grammar Simplification(The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016) Kalojanov, Javor; Wand, Michael; Slusallek, Philipp; Joaquim Jorge and Ming LinThis paper poses the problem of fabricating physical construction sets from example geometry: A construction set provides a small number of different types of building blocks from which the example model as well as many similar variants can be reassembled. This process is formalized by tiling grammars. Our core contribution is an approach for simplifying tiling grammars such that we obtain physically manufacturable building blocks of controllable granularity while retaining variability, i.e., the ability to construct many different, related shapes. Simplification is performed by sequences of two types of elementary operations: non-local joint edge collapses in the tile graphs reduce the granularity of the decomposition and approximate replacement operations reduce redundancy. We evaluate our method on abstract graph grammars in addition to computing several physical construction sets, which are manufactured using a commodity 3D printer.